Iqbal Day

Wednesday, 8 November 2017

Iqbal Day

We are taught
that Iqbal’s poetry jolted the Muslims of the Sub-Continent from their slumber,
with not much detail about the process itself

How do you interpret the plot of the poem ‘Iblees
and Gibrael’? asked my professor in the Urdu literature and language class
at New York University (NYU). I don’t know if we are reading Iqbal this month as a result of
coincidence or the palimpsest nostalgia of overseas Pakistanis, regardless it
is a provocative experience for me.

I am afraid to say that
after reading this poem I think of Iblees as the ultimate lover
who refused to share the love of his beloved. Was this when love was discovered
to be possessive in nature? Was Iblees’ banishment from the skies the first
exile this universe witnessed? And was it the first admonition for the mankind
to be careful about their choices and actions? All of these questions wracked
my brain when I read it this time.

Obviously, every text is subjected to diverse interpretations.
Professor Tahira Naqvi proposed
it to be a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ trope which is at the heart of the majority of the
stories ever written, read and discussed. She added that this is a conversation
between ‘virtuous’ and ‘evil’ but there is much more to be explored in each
dialogue here. Iqbal is not easy
to read for many reasons one of which is the reader’s limited knowledge of the
diverse contexts his poetry revolves around.

No doubt, Iqbal’s poetry encapsulates
so much in the totality of this universe that one needs to be familiar not only
with the world’s history but also with the history of humanity itself. In
continuation to this we kept on thinking about Iqbal as a person, an
intellectual, a religious scholar, and a nationalist poet which is the most
convenient introduction of Iqbal that we get from our history text books. Who
was Iqbal? Where he
was born and when? When did Iqbal die and where is he
buried? These are few essential questions that we are supposed to learn by
heart, in order to register ourselves to be good citizens of Pakistan, at the
age when it is impossible for us to grapple with the significance of Iqbal for
Pakistan.

My first exposure to Iqbal’s poetry was through PTV. I am a 90’s
kid who grew up with PTV as the only entertainment channel. Therefore, I never
missed Iqbal’s couplets telecasted in the ten-minute interval between the 8:00
PM primetime drama and the 9:00 PM news which were a ‘must watch’ for my
parents and I. Iqbal’s vocabulary was not comprehendible to me at that time.
However, because of the redundancy of a few chosen couplets that were
telecasted on that particular time I was able to memorise them. Occasionally ‘her lehza hai momin’ sung by Madam Noor Jahan
was also telecasted for Iqbal day, Independence Day, and Defence day.

In spite of the fact that we
recited ‘lab pe ati hai dua bun ke tamana meri’
every day in the morning assembly, but it was in the third grade that I learned
that Iqbal’s Urdu is the same as that of ours when I read ‘Jugnu aur Bulbul’ in my text book and then I
started getting comfortable with Iqbal being Pakistan’s national poet. ‘Aik makra our makhi’ and ‘Aik gaey or bakri’ are also among those that
we read in our primary school textbooks. Therefore, the Iqbal of primary school
textbook was a humanitarian, nature lover and moralist who taught us a lesson
like the ones in Disney stories

Meanwhile, we were also
taught that Iqbal’s poetry jolted the Muslims of the Sub-continent from their
slumber, with not much detail about the process itself but just to emphasise
Iqbal’s role. Once in the school’s debating competition, a boy addressed the
audience as ‘Iqbal kay shaheeno’ followed
by a phrase which was utterly disturbing to me ‘Shaheen
ka jahan or hai gargus ka jahan aur’. My little mind was perplexed for why
did our national poet chose to compare us with such an ugly looking bird and
why did he chose to mention another bird from the age of dinosaurs as I had
never heard of gargus before.

A few years later our secondary school text books introduced us
to Iqbal the Islamic revivalist through ‘Tulu-e-Islam’
and Iqbal emerged as a reformist in my imagination when I read sections of ‘Jawab-e-shikwa’ in my college years. In
addition to that our history books made sure that we know enough about Iqbal’s
letters to Jinnah which he wrote to convince Jinnah to come back from London
and lead Indian Muslims.

Ironically, at the time when the country is fighting a war
against terrorists and is facing challenges in protecting the living, we choose
to spend resources protecting the dead

Later in university, I got to
know Iqbal as a philosopher reading ‘Reconstruction
of religious thought in Islam’ which was in the recommended booklist for
CSS exams. However, my actual romance with Iqbal started very recently when I
visited the beautiful town of Heidelberg in Germany this summer where frequent
encounters with Iqbal provoked me to re-think and re-explore him in my own way.

Walking down a street named
after Iqbal, I noticed a plaque which pointed out Iqbal’s residence in
Heidelberg. It was here that I realised how shameful our ignorance about Iqbal
and Iqbal’s work is. The Iqbal chair at Heidelberg University has been vacant
since 2014 and this shows how concerned our academics are about this matter.

I have seen Iqbal’s portraits
hung in many government and academic offices as a symbol of admiration. This
admiration is not enough to inspire us to engage with Iqbal’s work. This is
another Iqbal who is present in performance but absent in practice as his
poetry has served its purpose in the freedom struggle and now all we need to do
is to respect him for his contributions.

We don’t want to brainstorm
on his ideas but only to proudly claim him as ‘our’ national poet. Pakistan honors
him every year in a guard changing ceremony at his tomb in Lahore.
Ironically, at the time when the country is fighting a war against terrorists
and is facing challenges in protecting the living, we choose to spend resources
protecting the ‘dead’. Nasira Javed once said in a conversation that people
have remembered Iqbal but forgotten his work. Hence, it is not the case that we
don’t honor him enough but the problem is that we don’t understand him enough.
Iqbal academy Lahore is a ray of hope in keeping Iqbal’s work alive in Pakistan
especially when Iqbal’s inclusion in Pakistani educational text is so limited,
selective and categorised that it is unable to do justice to the vast horizons
of Iqbal’s work. Iqbal’s glorification as Pakistan’s national poet has
unfortunately caused the downfall of his intellectual contributions. We as a
nation have reduced him to a glorified figure with whom we love to attach our
national prestige however we don’t have time to pay attention to his work which
is the reason for him being our national poet.

It is the valor of Iqbal’s
poetry that his dream remains the frame of reference for the creation of
Pakistan, regardless of our present disconnectedness with his work. There are a
lot of debates about Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan which somehow rests upon
Iqbal’s dream according to our textbook understanding of history. However, this
selective and categorical understanding of Iqbal, which fails to accommodate ‘Iblees and Jibreel’ and ‘Kabhi
aye Haqeeqat-e-muntazir’ together, and excludes “Saray
Jahan se acha Hindustan hamara’ for its anachronistic nature, is
completely contrary Iqbal’s resplendent scholarship.

The
writer graduated from Forman Christian College in Lahore, Pakistan in spring
2016 with double majors in history and political science and a minor in
sociology. She aims to pursue a doctorate to pursue her interests in Punjab in
the context of decolonisation and the comparative study of south Asia and other
post colonial states